Park Chung Hee Era

by Byung-kook Kim

  Moreover, as Park’s rhetoric of “Fatherland,” “modernization,” “catch-up,” “can do” spirit, and “administrative democracy” shows, his Third Republic (1963–1972) possessed an unsystematically articulated but still distinctive set of authoritarian norms and values that enabled society to grasp, however imperfectly and indirectly, what he stood for and what he opposed.

  As Byung-Kook Kim analyzes in Chapter 5, Park—sitting on top of a

  “two-pronged structure of institutional power,” with intelligence agents looking after his political interests and economic planners orchestrating a coordinated action across ministries—set national agendas, devised strategies, and organized institutional mechanisms without checks and balances not only from legislators, judges, chaeya activists, labor organizers, and farmers but also from within South Korea’s executive branch. The coercive security arm of his rule was controlled through a “divide-and-conquer strategy,” to quote Joo Hong Kim (Chapter 6), whereas his economic bureaucracy was made an instrument of Park’s goals and strategies by putting his “alter ego” (punsin) head pilot agencies in charge of mobilizing what Byung-Kook Kim in Chapter 7 calls “rationalized but patrimonial”

  state ministries. In a similar spirit, Hyug Baeg Im perceives Park as a South Korean version of Niccolò Machiavelli’s “prince,” transforming structural crises into an opportunity for yushin in 1972 by tapping his immense political resources. The launching of yushin is presented as his choice, forced on both ruling and opposition parties as a fait accompli.

  To be sure, Park’s grip on political power was much weaker during his junta days and his late yushin years (1978–1979). As Yong-Sup Han reports in Chapter 1, Park was both a master and a captive of power struggles plaguing his military junta, which kept on fragmenting into factions along generational, regional, and school ties and by military services. As Hyung-A Kim describes in Chapter 3, Park, wary of his military rivals,

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  turned to political and economic shock therapy in May 1961, June 1962, and March 1963 with an eye to protecting his power, with dire consequences for his state bureaucracy’s developmental capabilities. Such a cycle of power struggles and shock therapy ended only after Park weeded out the last of his rivals in March 1963 and, more important, when he won a tight presidential race in October. His grip on political power began slipping away—but only after 1978 when Yi Ch’ôl-s¤ng’s New Democratic Party (NDP) beat Park in National Assembly elections. A fatal split developed between “soft-liner” Kim Chae-gyu’s Korea Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) and “hard-liner” Ch’a Chi-ch’ôl’s Presidential Security Service (PSS) over how to deal with emboldened NDP opposition leaders, which Joo Hong Kim in Chapter 6 and Myung-Lim Park in Chapter 13 see as explaining Park Chung Hee’s demise in October 1979.

  However, these developments represented a variation of Park’s grip on power, not his regime’s authoritarian character. His control over political goals, agendas, and strategies, and his ability to contain the negative consequences of his decisions, waxed and waned depending on power structures and factional struggles within his inner circles, but, regardless of an increase or a decline in his grip on power, the political regime Park led remained authoritarian throughout his eighteen years of rule. Nonetheless, there are two problems with Linz’s concept of authoritarianism.

  First, there is the issue of whether the presence or absence of elections affects regime dynamics in visible ways even in an authoritarian context, so that this factor needs be taken as a key criterion in our typology of political regimes, no matter how far short elections fell from being a fair contest for power. The relationship between elections and political regimes is an issue because Park’s Third Republic (1963–1972) exhibited many of Linz’s features of authoritarianism, but it still regularly held presidential elections, albeit of a limited pluralistic kind marred by bureaucratically organized money politics and McCarthyist Red scares, before opting for a system of indirect presidential elections in 1972 to ensure lifelong rule.

  Jorge I. Domínguez in Chapter 20 argues that Park Chung Hee’s 1972 political move transformed his regime from an “above-median performer”

  into a “below-median performer” in political governance, relying more on repression than on co-optation to maintain political order and social stability. The presence of elections, however imperfect they were as a mechanism of political representation and political accountability, is diagnosed as having helped Park to legitimate his authoritarian Third Republic. Electoral politics of even an illiberal character and restricted but still available institutions of consultation accompanying it, such as legislatures, political parties, and corporatist interest groups, help authoritarian rulers like Park,

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  as Domínguez comments, “diversify the tool kit for ruling and policymaking . . . reduce the cost of rulership . . . sustain a broad base of support

  . . . [and] harness economic and social forces toward [their] goals while employing a minimum level of military force.”

  Echoing Domínguez’s appraisal, Hyug Bae Im looks at Park’s purge of limited but still contentious electoral competition in 1972 through the inauguration of his yushin regime as a decision of paramount importance, qualitatively altering regime dynamics. Finding Linz’s sweeping typology of authoritarianism too limiting, Im distinguishes much of Park’s directly elected presidential terms (1963–1971) as a case of “soft authoritarianism,” and his subsequent period of rule as a “garrison state.” With his legitimacy weakened by his own act of palace coup, Byung-Kook Kim argues in Chapter 5, Park ruled directly through his praetorian guards rather than indirectly through a circle of independently based party bosses. Such a change within his authoritarian regime also transformed society. As Myung-Lim Park describes, chaeya activists radicalized into a panch’aeje (anti-system) force and opposition party leaders turned “intransigent” in tandem with Park’s greater use of repression. Gregory W. Noble in Chapter 21 also reports that South Korea took a path of industrial modernization different from that of Taiwan with the launching of yushin. Previously, the two had taken similar paths under common capital and technological requirements determined by the industrial sector. With his garrison state in place, Park was able to temporarily transcend these sectoral constraints to tackle ever more ambitious economic projects in the hope of legitimating his rule and strengthening his power.

  Linz’s concept thus needs be supplemented by a typology of authoritarian regimes if it is to help in clarifying their role in the politics of modernization. As Domínguez persuasively argues, there are diverse ways to design political institutions of authoritarian rule. Moreover, how institutional choices are aligned has a serious impact on political order and social stability by affecting regime capabilities for political control, co-optation, and repression. In an effort to distinguish authoritarian regimes by their diverging internal institutional designs, some differentiate “soft” from

  “hard” authoritarian regimes,5 whereas others categorize their varying character into predatory6 versus technocratic,7 político versus técnico,8 or state corporatist versus state monist types.9 Such dichotomous typologies, however, miss many of the ambiguities of existing authoritarian regimes, especially those with a proven record of political stability or socioeconomic modernization, as in much of Park Chung Hee’s rule. It cannot be otherwise, because success comes through dexterously mixing what look like mutually exclusive and unmixable concepts. Like Joel D. Aberbach,

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  Robert D. Putnam, and Bert A. Rockman, who, seeking to capture this mixture of seemingly opposite roles, speak of “pure hybrids” leading the bureaucratization of politics and the politicization of bureaucracy in Western democracies,10 Roderic Ai Camp once spoke of “political technocrats”

  to describe Mexico’s new hybrid ruling elite.11

  The chapters in this book have a similar understanding of Par
k Chung Hee’s political regime, describing its Blue House Secretariat as resting on a two-pronged leadership of mutually exclusive but functionally complementary economic bureaucrats and military praetorian guards (see Chapter 5), its economic state apparatus as lying between predatory and technocratic role types (Chapter 7), its ruling political party as highly centralized in organization but with potentially powerful centrifugal forces of factionalism (Chapters 5, 6, and 8), its power elite as recruiting much of its leaders from South Korea’s professional but patrimonial military and civilian state bureaucracy (Chapters 6 and 7), and its mechanisms of policymaking as showing traits of both “institutionalization and personalization,” to quote Paul D. Hutchcroft’s Chapter 19. In other words, to explain how and why South Korea dramatically altered its course of modernization after 1961, we must go beyond Linz’s concept of authoritarian regimes and analyze their varying internal institutional arrangements in nondichoto-mous ways.

  Developmental State

  Developmental state theories, Hyung-A Kim writes in Chapter 3, explain South Korea’s hypergrowth “primarily in terms of its possession of a professional ‘Weberian’ state imbued with the ethos of ‘plan rationality’ . . .

  [but this] is a myth.” As argued by many of our authors, developmental state theories have five issues wrong.

  First, given their understanding of South Korean policymaking processes as basically “technocratic,” developmental state theories analytically focus on state bureaucrats rather than on those bureaucrats’ political master, Park Chung Hee, to explain policy preferences, goals, and strategies. The lack of documented historical data is certainly one cause of the neglect of Park’s political role, but this problem does not invalidate our criticism. The system of political rule undergirding hypergrowth was thoroughly bureaucratic, with security guards and economic technocrats dominating ideologically shallow and organizationally weak political parties and interest groups, but its driver, wielding discretionary powers without checks or balances, was Park Chung Hee. Following Hyung-A Kim’s

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  lead, Byung-Kook Kim puts Peter Evans’s notion of “embedded autonomy” on its head in describing South Korea’s developmental state in Chapter 7. The state possessed a Weberian sense of corporate coherence only because Park lined up ministries—and, by extension, their social constituencies and political allies—into an internally segmented hierarchy of

  “core,” “strategic sectoral,” and “auxiliary” groups with varying institutional privileges and vulnerabilities. To construct such a bureaucracy externally insulated from party politics and internally disciplined into a clear rank order, with his newly established Economic Planning Board (EPB) as its core, Park had to constantly intervene in bureaucratic politics to tilt power away from strategic sectoral and auxiliary ministries—and, in case of 1964–1967, even the MoF, another core agency in his bureaucratic scheme. South Korea’s “Weberian” corporate coherence was a fundamentally political artifact, historically created, maintained, and driven by Park Chung Hee.

  Second, as Evans argued, South Korea’s developmental state was “embedded in a concrete set of social ties,” which enabled a continual negotiation of goals and policies between state and chaebol actors, but it was Park who set the terms of the negotiation. The policy decisions responsible for putting South Korea on a path of hypergrowth, from its introduction of a reverse interest rate system in 1964, to a freeze of interest payments on private “curb-market” loans in 1972, to a promulgation of heavy and chemical industrialization (HCI) in 1973, to an integrated stabilization policy in 1979, were all decided by Park in the face of resistance from one or another group of state ministries (see Chapter 7). Likewise, in Chapter 12

  Young Jo Lee sees South Korea’s plunge into Saema¤l Undong (the New Village Movement) with massive price supports for rice and barley in 1975

  as primarily driven by Park. His shadow was even larger in South Korea’s foreign policy initiatives to back up developmental policies. As retold by Min Yong Lee in Chapter 14, Park offered to dispatch military troops to South Vietnam as early as 1961, only to see John F. Kennedy respond negatively. When his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, altered U.S. policy and courted Park for troop dispatch in 1964, Park swiftly lined up Democratic Republican Party (DRP) politicians behind military intervention in South Vietnam. The normalization of diplomatic relations with Japan in 1965, Jung-Hoon Lee similarly argues in Chapter 15, was possible only because Park Chung Hee stuck his neck out. The resources secured through both troop dispatch and diplomatic normalization with Japan became Park’s seed money to subsidize industrial programs, including his pet project, the launching of an integrated steel mill.

  Third, with Park at the top of a hierarchically organized state bureaucracy and in control of institutional channels of negotiation with min-

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  istries, chaebol companies ended up directly engaging in asymmetric political exchange with Park and his Blue House Secretariat rather than working through bureaucratic hierarchies on most critical decisions. Contradicting developmental state theories, chaebol groups were junior partners of Park, but not of state bureaucrats. And this was a partnership between what Eun Mee Kim and Gil-Sung Park’s Chapter 9 calls “visionaries,” enabling each other to achieve vital interests—hypergrowth for Park and corporate expansion for chaebol owners—through “mutual guarantees” of political support and economic risk-taking, respectively.

  With an eye to prevent mutual guarantees from degenerating into moral hazards, Park developed three rules: partner with chaebol groups with a proven track record of entrepreneurship, build a structure of oligopolistic competition, and let failing chaebol companies go under once relief measures are exhausted. There was also a rule that chaebol should never seek political power either on their own or as an ally of Park Chung Hee’s potential political rivals. They were severely punished when their political loyalty was in question.12

  As recounted by Nae-Young Lee in Chapter 10, in South Korea’s automobile industry, even the support of Park Chung Hee’s right-hand men—

  Kim Chong-p’il and Yi Hu-rak—could not prevent Saenara from going bankrupt in 1963 or protect Sinjin Motors’ monopoly on auto assembly from Hyundai Motors’ and Asia Motor’s challenges in 1967–1968, respectively. The auto industry was a “graveyard of would-be chaebol groups.”

  Sinjin took over Saenara in 1965, then formed a 50:50 joint venture with General Motors in 1972, only to sell its shares to a state development bank in 1976, while Asia Motors was taken over by a latecomer, Kia Motors, in 1976. Only Hyundai Motors grew into an independent multinational,

  “producing autos with [its] own national brand name under an economically sustainable cycle of model changes, and in collaboration with a dense network of nationally owned but foreign technology–licensed suppliers as well as an extensive global distributive system of sales and services.”

  Fourth, as a corollary of the primacy of politics in South Korea’s formation of a state that is both coherent and embedded in a set of political relationships of asymmetric exchange with chaebol industrialists, “technocratic rationality” is a concept with limited utility in describing that state’s preferences, goals, and strategies. Much of its macroeconomic policies were, in fact, anything but technocratic. The military junta’s shock therapy, coupled with its churyu (mainstream) faction’s clandestine drive to raise political funds, derailed South Korea’s fragile economy (see Chapter 3). The high-risk post-1964 strategy of getting chaebol groups to diversify into new frontiers of industrial growth through bureaucratically distributed subsidized loans burdened banks with huge nonperforming loans,

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  which made policymakers hypersensitive to any signs of an interest rate hike, lest their highly leveraged chaebol partners fail under mounting interest payments and threaten creditors as well. To keep both chaebol groups and banks afloat, South Korea s
trove to keep its growth rate high, even with shock therapy that compromised private property rights, as its freeze of interest payments on curb-market loans in 1972 showed (Chapter 7).

  The phenomenal growth rate of 9.3 percent under Park, then, does not by itself demonstrate his state’s technocratic character. On the contrary, it is more likely to have resulted from his fear of corporate and financial distress, which he knew could develop into an irreparable systemic crisis, once he had instituted a reverse interest rate system with deposit rates set higher than loan rates in 1965 at the cost of a massive accumulation of nonperforming loans.

  The history of industrial policy under Park Chung Hee additionally urges us to adopt a political rather than a technocratic perspective. The state continually required a larger scale of production, a higher local content, a more infrequent change of models, a greater share of exports, as well as a tighter network of vertical integration (kyeyôlhwa) with small-size parts-and-components producers in South Korea’s auto industry as its conditions for policy support, until it de facto ended up demanding its infant assemblers’ transformation into global players in 1973. The 1973

  plan was “unrealistic . . . a dangerous gamble, if not wishful thinking,” to quote Nae-Young Lee. Likewise, Sang-young Rhyu and Seok-jin Lew’s Chapter 11 describes the consistently negative reactions of international donors and lenders, from U.S. policymakers to World Bank economists to Western European and Japanese bankers, to Park Chung Hee’s proposal to build an integrated steel mill. “That it was Japan’s 1969 provision of reparation funds rather than commercial loans that eventually got South Korea to launch its steel project,” Rhyu and Lew write, “attested to the centrality of Park and his ambition, not his developmental state’s technocratic prowess.”